“Was this Grandpa’s?”
“Yes.”
“He was a biker?”
“Sort of.”
“Were you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t want to be.”
She stared.
“Was Grandpa mad?”
“He died before he could be mad.”
The girl considered.
“Would he be?”
Her father smiled.
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he specifically told people not to make me into him.”
The girl nodded approvingly.
“Smart.”
“Sometimes.”
She touched the crooked stitches.
“You sewed this?”
“Yes.”
“You’re bad.”
“I was ten.”
“I sew better.”
“You definitely do.”
She looked at the patch.
“Can I have a motorcycle?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“You’re seven.”
“What about when I’m eight?”
“No.”
“Nine?”
“No.”
She frowned.
“Grandpa said choose.”
Her father closed his eyes.
The dead continued causing problems.
He laughed.
“Your grandmother is going to enjoy this.”
The little girl smiled.
“Can I hear one?”
“A motorcycle?”
“Yes.”
Her father thought about a hospital window.
Sunrise.
Engines.
Fear surrounded instead of erased.
He opened a video on his phone.
Not the hospital day.
There was no good recording.
A simple motorcycle starting in a garage.
The girl listened.
“That’s loud.”
“Yes.”
“Did it make you think of Grandpa?”
“When I was little.”
“What does it make you think of now?”
Her father looked at the faded patch.
“The old man with the beard.”
“The grandpa one?”
“He wasn’t my grandpa.”
“What was he?”
The therapist smiled.
“Something like that.”
His daughter accepted the answer.
Children understood flexible definitions better than adults.
That night, after she slept, the therapist placed the patch back in the cabinet.
His wife came into the room.
“You okay?”
“Yes.”
She looked toward the patch.
“That story again?”
“Our daughter found it.”
“What did she ask?”
“For a motorcycle.”
His wife laughed.
“Absolutely not.”
“Good.”
He smiled.
Then became quiet.
His wife noticed.
“What?”
“I was thinking about the morning they came.”
She had heard the story many times.
Still, she waited.
“I spent years believing the important part was that Dad arranged it before he died.”
She leaned against the cabinet.
“And?”
“I think the important part is everybody who came who never knew him.”
His wife nodded.
“Why?”
“Because promises explain eight people.”
“Maybe twenty.”
“They don’t explain two hundred.”
“What does?”
He thought.
“Somebody said a kid was scared.”
She smiled.
“That enough?”
“Apparently.”
He closed the cabinet.
And perhaps that was why, decades after the engines stopped rumbling beneath the hospital windows, the story still mattered.
Not because two hundred motorcycles were extraordinary.
Machines gather easily.
People gather for festivals, rallies, races, funerals.
Noise attracts crowds.